Will a 3/16th setup produce enough vacuum to allow for a sap ladder?

[Dave Lister]

Does anybody know if a sap ladder is at all possible with a very tight 3/16th inch tubing setup provided that there is enough drop after the sap ladder?
I'm planning on replacing my 1 inch mainline on gravity with the 3/16 tubing this next year and have two or three sections that I've never been able to tap because they would have ended about 5 to 8 feet to low to reach the mainline. Each section has over twenty taps. But after those spots, if I continued the 3/16 run to the collection tank, it would easily drop twenty feet before it hit the collection point.

[BreezyHill]

In theory...Yes. In reality it will be quite a feet to accomplish.
The main reason is that you will need to have, on the down hill side, a good amount of taps to pull enough vacuum to get the vacuum level high enough to pull the sap up the ladder.
Don't get me wrong...I respect those that use 3/16 and more power to them. My fear is that you will spend a great amount of time and funds and it will fail if there is one tap that doesn't seal perfectly.
This is also true of a conventional sap ladder. It doesn't take much to have a failure.

This season my system was not working correct...bush rats chewed two small holes and deer raised havoc with three saddles. After they were fixed vac went up and the ladders were fine again.
5 and 8 feet is very easy to pull with conventional vacuum...a dairy pump that is choked down to only allow 15" will supply enough vac to handle this with ease.

[DrTimPerkins]

Does anybody know if a sap ladder is at all possible with a very tight 3/16th inch tubing setup provided that there is enough drop after the sap ladder?

It might be made to work, but not very well. You would need (as has been said by Breezy) several trees BELOW the ladder to provide the force needed to get sap pulled up through the ladder, OR you would not get sap movement (and natural vacuum) from ABOVE the ladder to fill the entire height of the ladder with enough sap to push it upward and out the other side of the ladder by sap coming from the trees. Until that point it would be a restriction in the system. I'd try most everything else possible before going this route.